All right, who made the header picture for the DUzy Awards? I want to know NOW!

[Redstone]

Because I want to tell him or her what an astonishingly good artist he or she is.

I am just stunned.

Redstone

[Starbucks Anarchist]

1. I believe DUer kgfnally created it.

Excellent work.

[SoCalDem]

3. I do feel sorry for the poor little :rofl: about to be sacrificed on the altar though

:scared:

[Occulus]

5. You should have seen the other one.

:evilgrin:

[trusty elf]

12. And let's hear it for the hilarious "Bush administration" anagrams

in his signature line!


:yourock:

[CaliforniaPeggy]

2. My dear Redstone!

It is gorgeous, isn't it?

Nice to see you tonight!

Hope you're feeling well...

:hug:

Did you see? You got a DUzy! One of locked thread ones...

[Occulus]

4. That would be me! :D Thank you for the compliment!

If you're curious, to build the scene, I used blender, an open-source (remember, that's FREE!!) 3D modeling and animation package. As you can see, Blender is remarkably powerful for being a free 3D application, and in fact has been used professionally for several television commercials.

edit: LOL, I just tried to visit all those links and got 404's for my trouble. I would guess the blender forum kids overloaded their servers trying to see some professional Blender work. You can find one more up-to-date example here. :D

Technical, pompous gobbledygook: the major reason this image looks so 'realistic' is because of something called Global Illumination. Blender's stock internal rendering engine is something called a raytracer, and while the results are good, the lighting results in Blender and other raytracers I've used, such as Bryce and POVray, simply aren't terribly convincing. Shadows are very accurate, but also very sharp, and lacking in any evidence of ambient light unless it's faked.

Enter the aforementioned Global Illumination. For the DUzy scene, I used a program called Yafray, an acronym for "Yet Another Free RAYtracer". Since Blender internally supports Yafray, this was the obvious choice. Yafray calculates not only the geometry of the scene, but also individual photons either coming from the 'world' environment (sky) or shot into the scene by a special photon lamp. The number of photons and bounces of light are defined by the user, and vary widely from scene to scene.

Although I didn't include it in the DUzy scene, Yafray also supports something called caustics. It can best be described with an example (not my creation):



See how the light shines through the crystal ball, and refracts onto the surface beneath it? That's the result of the actual calculation of the photons as they travel through the ball (and again, the number of bounces is user-defined). Caustics are very very cool, and makes an image with any sort of refracted light look absolutely real, but I couldn't find a place for the effect in the DUzy award. Pity, that. :)

The GI result, in any case, is stunningly realistic. When a scene using global illumination- properly- is animated, though, you get visual effects such as what you see in film and on TV. It's really very amazing how much power has been placed into the hands of the public with this tool, as Blender isn't just an animation package but also a compositor for both film and audio. As of Blender 2.44, subsurface scattering is supported, which is what you see when you hold the webbing between your fingers up to a bright lamp.

For a real treat, take a look at Elephant's Dream, an animated short film created entirely in Blender (you can even download ALL of the assets for the entire film!!). You might also want to take a look at some of the other Blender projects.

I hope this didn't come across as pedantic or boring. I love to share how I pull off things in Blender, in part because I just like to share the knowledge, but also because it's in the spirit of this open source project in particular to 'evangelize' the software. It's just too powerful and useful of a project to not be hollered to the hills.

:D

[Oilwellian]

6. Really impressive!

I'm sending your post to my son...he's a photoshop genius and probably already knows what you speak of but just in case....

Congrats on a gorgeous pic. :toast:

[ConsAreLiars]

7. Great job! A minor tweak

would be to angle the two outer wheels outward a bit to be more supportive of the perspective. And thanks for your proof that open source software differs from commercial primarily in terms of cost to the user and the size of the advertising budget, not the results achieved.

[MilesColtrane]

9. I think those are footlights, not wheels.

[Duer 157099]

8. Awesome! Thanks for all the technical details.

Seems like you should be spending some time in the computer group, no? :D

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topics&forum=242

I've got to check out those programs! :hi:

[malaise]

10. It's fabulous

Congrats. :yourock:

[trusty elf]

11. Dear kgfnally,

I would also like to express my admiration for your DUzy graphic! Inspired work!

As a photoshop dabbler myself I was very interested to read what you had to say about it. I've downloaded the blender software and look forward to trying it out.

Again, very well done, and thanks for sharing!

tomeboy

[Occulus]

13. Thanks :D There's one link I really ought to add

A professor at Tufts University has opened up his Blender course! There are a lot of video and .pdf tutorials to view and learn from; the course can be found here and covers the latest and greatest Blender, version 2.45.

Happy blending! :D

[trusty elf]

14. Cool!

Thanks!

:hi: